by David Drake
As soon as Franca had disappeared, the rest of the band slid or scrambled to follow him. Shouts and complaints reverberated. Sharina, Scoggin, and Neal holding the comatose wizard were the only ones who remained in the wind.
“Go!” Neal said to her. “Scoggin, you follow and I’ll hand Alfdan to you through the hole, all right?”
Sharina set her bearskin on the ice and slid to the bottom of the slope. She spread her feet to either side of the opening to catch herself, then dropped through holding Beard overhead. She didn’t want to open somebody up when she hit the ground.
Actually, she landed on Layson, on all fours and trying to get up. He snarled a curse, then realized who it was. “Here, mistress!” he said and whisked her out of the way before Scoggin dropped where she’d been.
The roof of the tunnel was about six feet high. The floor was stone, an ancient lava flow; it was warm beneath the skin of water trickling over it. The frozen walls shone azure and crimson in concert with the sky; instead of filtering the wizardlight, the ice seemed to amplify the glow into evil brilliance.
At the inland end of the tunnel was a house, just as Burness had said. It was a low, dome built from the rib bones of whales; feathers of baleen chinked the interstices. It must have dated from well before She came: a shelter for whalers trying out their catch on shore and perhaps wintering over if they were caught when the seas skirting the Ice Capes froze early.
“The ground’s warm!” one of the men said. He must only now have noticed it. “Why’s that?”
“The volcano, Bayber,” Layson snapped as he helped Scoggin bring Alfdan up the tunnel. They transported the wizard with his arms over their shoulders. His toes dragged. “There’s a vein of lava under the rock here, I shouldn’t wonder. What we saw up on of the mountain had to come from somewhere, right?”
“You mean we’re sitting on lava?” a short, shaggy man demanded. “Hey! What if it breaks out?”
“If you had nothing worse to worry about than the volcano,” said Beard in a clear, cutting tone, “then you’d live longer than I expect to be the case.”
The axe chortled metallically and added, “But oh, it will be a splendid time! The lives Beard and his mistress will drink, oh! Splendid!”
“Can’t you shut him up?” Burness muttered, but it wasn’t a serious complaint. Sharina recalled that he’d been with Alfdan the longest, which meant he’d seen more of the wizard’s companions die than anybody else in the band. The others might pretend to themselves that Alfdan would save them, but Burness couldn’t do that.
“Hush, Master Beard!” Sharina said in the crisp voice she’d have used to an affectionate drunk when she was serving drinks in her father’s taproom. “You’re discourteous.”
The axe sniffed, but he subsided.
Several of the men had already entered the building. It was fairly large, twenty feet by ten on the long and short axes. “Hey, there were people here,” Offlan said. “The ashes in the hearth still have the shape of the wood!”
“That’s not wood,” said Beard. “There’s no wood here. They were burning bones, and of those there’s no lack ”
Looking at the edges of the tunnel, Sharina saw that the bottom of the ice had been chiseled out for some distance along the former shoreline. The strand would’ve been covered by the debris the whalers had left. The bones’ fatty marrow would make them excellent fuel once they’d been chopped from the ice.
“Where’d they go, then?” Neal said. He’d followed Scoggin and Layson, nervous about leaving Alfdan in their care but unwilling to insist that they let him carry the wizard instead. “There’s nowhere but the other way in the tunnel, is there?”
“There’s down a beetle’s belly,” said Beard. “Which is where they went, all three of them, and only last night. They’d lived here ten years, ever since She came and the ice locked in their boat; and now they’re gone. Mostly.”
“Oh,” said Sharina, glancing at something glistening in the water, half hidden where the ice had been dug out. It was a right foot, shoeless and filthy looking, severed raggedly at the ankle. “I see what you mean.”
“The tunnel goes down to the water,” called one of the pair of men who’d gone in the other direction without anybody telling them to. “There’s a trotline out to sea on driftwood floats.”
“All right,” said Neal, forceful again once the wizard had been laid on the stone floor wrapped in a sheepskin robe. “We’ll stay here tonight. There’s room in the hut for all of us, I think. In the morning... when Alfdan gets his strength back, anyway, we’ll go on. I guess were pretty close by now to where we’re going.”
Sharina looked at the building. Its sturdy door had been fashioned of ships’ timbers, but it’d been smashed off its jamb; the splintered wood was still fresh. The sealskin latchcord still dangled from a hole near the top of the panel.
“The beetle dug down through the ice,” Beard said, “but its body was too large for the tunnel. It extended its jaw—it’s hinged, you see—and plucked them out of the house one and one and the third. And then it went away... for a time.”
“I think...,” said Sharina, looking around her. The stone was wet everywhere, but that was true within the hut as well as outside it; and the water wasn’t cold, not really. “I think I’ll sleep out here. The rest of you can have the hut, if you like.”
“Don’t you like the decor, mistress?” Beard asked mockingly. “I think it’s quite attractive, in its way.”
“I don’t,” said Sharina, squatting to pat the rock where a natural hollow looked like it might cradle her hip.
Sharina didn’t fear death, but she’d never regarded it as her friend, either. The dismembered foot proved that the house of bones was no protection... and the structure was too clear a symbol of this world that She ruled for Sharina to want to sleep in its false shelter.
Chapter 20
Cashel sat on a dried tussock, polishing his quarterstaff and watching airboats from many different manors arrive. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen so many people in one place before, even when Garric was addressing the biggest crowds that could hear him in Valles. They just kept coming in, boat after boat from all directions.
Kotia’d taken charge of things. Every time a new group arrived, the lord of the manor came over and talked to her before doing anything else. Nobody at all came near where Cashel sat, but every time he looked around he saw eyes staring at him.
“That’s Lady Raki,” said Evne, perched as usual on Cashel’s shoulder. She was rubbing herself down with one hind leg, then the other; grooming, Cashel guessed, though it wasn’t a subject he wanted to get into with a toad. “She’s mistress of Manor Rakon on the north side of the basin. It’s suspended on threads over the Frozen Sea.”
Initially Cashel’d been worried about whether Kotia was going to have trouble being surrounded by her world’s most powerful people. He relaxed almost at once. Kotia didn’t need his support to take care of those folk or anybody else.
“And my goodness, there’s Lord Bossian,” said Evne, pointing her long foot at a particularly ornate airboat approaching from the west. It looked like three hulls joined together and the whole thing covered by a canopy of rainbow-colored fabric. “I was wondering when he’d decide to show his face.”
Cashel watched the big airboat slanting down at a majestic pace. “I wouldn’t have guessed Bossian wanted to come around,” he said. “I’d have thought he’d be embarrassed, to tell the truth.”
Evne sniffed. “Embarrassed? Him?” she said. “Anyway, he’s just as much afraid of you as he was of the Visitor. He’s coming to see what he can do to keep you from destroying him.”
Her long tongue licked out. She chuckled and added, “From squashing him like a bug!”
The airboat settled to the ground close enough that Cashel could’ve thrown a rock to it if he’d had any need to. It held more people than Cashel could count on his fingers. He recognized a few of them from dinner at Manor Bossian all that time ago, t
hough he didn’t recall their names if he’d even heard them. Except for Lord Bossian, of course.
“He doesn’t need to be afraid of me,” Cashel said.
“Doesn’t he?” said Evne. “No, I don’t suppose he does. But he needs to be very much afraid of your friend Kotia, master.”
Lord Bossian got out of his airboat. He looked a good ten years older than he had when Cashel last saw him, worn and gray. He was wearing clean clothes, but he had a line of angry blisters on his left cheek: something hot had splashed him in the recent past.
Bossian looked at Kotia, then deliberately turned and started walking toward Cashel. A man and a woman followed, but the rest of those from the airboat hung back.
“Lord Bossian!” Kotia said. The nearly spherical Lady Raki and two lords of manor were standing near Kotia. They quickly shifted so they weren’t between Kotia and Bossian.
Bossian glanced over his shoulder. The man and woman with him stopped where they were.
“Lady Kotia,” Bossian said in a loud voice. “I’m going to offer my congratulations to Lord Cashel, the great wizard who has conquered the Visitor!”
He took another half step. Kotia stretched out her right hand and spoke under her breath. A ring of crackling fire, bright as Kakoral’s heart, roared up around him.
Bossian screamed and stopped where he was. The vividly-dressed crowd gave a collective gasp and fled outward. Some people threw themselves into airboats or behind them.
Cashel got up and walked toward Bossian, leaning his staff over his right shoulder so it wouldn’t look like he was planning to do anything with it. He’d been really tired after all the business in the Visitor’s ship, but he figured he was back in shape now. That was a good thing, seeings as Kotia was her full prickly self.
The ring of fire vanished in an eyeblink, just as it’d appeared. The ground it’d sprung from wasn’t scorched.
“The girl formed an illusion rather than real flame,” Evne said in a tone of appraisal. “As she could easily have done, of course. Her father and the Visitor between them have awakened what was already in her.”
Maybe the fire hadn’t been real, but even after it disappeared Bossian couldn’t have been more afraid if he’d had a knife point pricking his eye. He stood trembling, unwilling even to turn his head to look squarely at Cashel.
Kotia was walking over from the other direction. “Indeed, Lord Cashel is master here, Bossian,” she said, plenty loud enough for others to hear even after they’d scrambled back. “Therefore politeness dictates he not be disturbed unless he requests to be; and if politeness fails, his friends have other means!”
“It’s all right, Kotia,” Cashel said. “Bossian, you can relax. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
He gave Kotia a friendly smile. He didn’t care for people talking about him like he wasn’t there, but Kotia had a right to be angry. Bossian hadn’t owed anything to a stranger like Cashel, but he’d taken Kotia under his protection—until there was something to protect her against.
“He isn’t worth anybody’s concern, is he, milord?” Kotia said. She stepped to Cashel’s right side, looking at Bossian with the kind of expression you’d give a scrawny ewe who wasn’t worth pasturage even until fall. Cashel noticed that Kotia was being a lot more deferential to him than she’d been when it was just the two of them and Evne.
The toad padded softly around Cashel’s neck and squatted on his right shoulder; he shifted the quarterstaff. Evne’s feet tickled, but this probably wouldn’t be a good time to laugh.
Bossian cleared his throat. The two people who’d started toward Cashel with him were now with the rest of the group behind the big airboat. “I came to congratulate you, milord,” he said. “Ah, to thank you for driving away the Visitor.”
“Drive the Visitor away?” Evne said in rising incredulity. “Is that what you think? You worm! Master Cashel destroyed the Visitor. As though he never was!”
“Well, it wasn’t really me...,” Cashel muttered, but he didn’t try to make himself heard. It was all pretty complicated, and he didn’t guess he needed to explain things to Bossian. ‘Worm’ was a good enough description for the man, though it occurred to him that when a toad used the word it might mean something a little different.
“I beg your pardon, Lord Cashel,” Bossian said, licking his lips and looking about as nervous as he had when Kotia looped the fire around him. He was staring at the air between Cashel’s right shoulder and Kotia without meeting the eyes of either of them. “I didn’t mean... that is....”
He cleared his throat and tried again, this time looking straight at Cashel. “The collection of objects of power here in the Basin is quite remarkable,” he said. “I suppose they were gathered by the Visitor?”
“Of course they were gathered by the Visitor,” Evne said in a mocking falsetto. “On some twenty worlds besides this one, I might add. Perhaps more—I haven’t had a chance to do a proper inventory yet.”
Bossian stared at her. For the first time he seemed to have taken in the fact that a toad was talking to him.
“Her name’s Evne,” Cashel said. “You gave her to me in the lump of coal.”
He paused, then added, “Thank you. I wouldn’t have gotten very far without her.”
“With the objects I see here...,” Bossian went on, looking to one side and then the other reflexively. “You’ll be able to raise an impressive manor—”
“A unique manor,” Kotia corrected. “A manor beyond any other in the world!”
Bossian grimaced. “Yes, I’m sure that’s so,” he said. “A unique manor. With these objects, your power is greater than that of all of us combined.”
“I should’ve thought that became obvious when my master destroyed the Visitor,” Evne said, rubbing the back of her head with her forefeet. “Even a worm should’ve realized that.”
“I’m not going to build a manor,” Cashel said. “Even if I knew how, I mean. I just want to go home.”
He shook his head, trying to clear the nonsense out of it. He didn’t see why he had to explain stuff like this. It was bad enough any time when people jumped to conclusions about him, and these conclusions didn’t make a bit of sense. Why would he want to stay here?
“Look, when I first got here,” Cashel continued before any of the others jumped in with another comment, “Kotia thought you could send me back home, Lord Bossian. Is that right? Can you?”
“I can, Lord Cashel,” Kotia said. Her face was unreadable. “If that’s what you really want.”
With a sudden, fierce expression, she put her hand over the back of Cashel’s right hand. She said, “There’s nothing in this world that the man who conquered the Visitor can’t have, you know. Nothing!”
Cashel shook his head. He didn’t pull his hand away, though Kotia’s touch made him feel uncomfortable. “There’s nothing here that I want, mistress,” he said. “Except to go home.”
Kotia met his eyes for a long moment. She stepped back, perfectly the lady. “Yes,” she said, “I see that. I’ll take care of the matter as soon as you wish, milord.”
“Since you won’t be able to take away all the objects that you, ah, fell heir to,” said Lord Bossian, “I suppose those of us holding existing manors should divide them among—”
Evne laughed incredulously. Her voice was really a lot louder than ought to come from a little toad.
“No, I am not going to divide Lord Cashel’s property with you, Lord Bossian,” Kotia said with sneering emphasis. She looked around the huge gathering. It seemed to Cashel that there were more airboats than he’d seen of anything except wavetops in a storm. “Nor with the others. Some of you are cowards and all of you are weaklings compared to Cashel. And compared to me!”
“Where will you build your manor, girl?” the toad asked. “Right here in the middle of the Basin, I suppose?”
“It won’t be my manor!” Kotia said. “I’ll build it for Lord Cashel. If ever he chooses to return, it’ll be waiting for him. Everythi
ng will be waiting for him!”
“He won’t come back, girl,” said Evne. There was more in her voice than a simple statement, but Cashel couldn’t be sure quite what it was. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Do I?” said Kotia bitterly. Then, glaring at Bossian, she snapped, “Go away, milord. Go back to your manor. If I have need of you here, I’ll summon you.” She sniffed. “As well I may.”
Bossian blinked at her, then backed away. When he was half the distance to his airboat he turned and trotted the rest of the way, calling to his companions.
“You could do better,” the toad said, looking at Kotia.
Kotia shrugged. “No doubt,” she said. “But the thought amuses me.”
Her face went grimly blank again. “What about you, Mistress Toad?” she said. “I can return you to your own shape now, of course. Is that what you want?”
Evne stretched one hind leg, then the other. “I’ve been a toad so long...,” she said. She turned her head toward Cashel. She was so close that he could only see her out of one eye.
She looked back at Kotia. “The emotions aren’t as fierce in this shape,” she said. “All I ever got from human emotions was to be locked into a block of coal.” She laughed, only partly in amusement, then added, “Thank you, girl, but I think I’ll leave things as they are. I’d miss the taste of flies, and my neighbors would speak harshly of me if I didn’t give up the sport of catching them.”
“I can see the advantage,” Kotia said, smiling wryly as she looked from Evne to Cashel himself. “Well, if you change your mind....”
People were gathering the various bits and pieces that’d fallen to the ground when the ship burned. Now that Kotia wasn’t flinging around flames and angry shouts, folks came up in groups with what they’d found. Kotia must’ve given orders when people talked to her as they arrived.
Even parts of things that’d broken seemed worth gathering up. The big glass something that hadn’t missed Cashel by much when it fell was arriving in any number of fragments, carried reverently in the lifted skirts of servants’ tunics.
